Keynote: We The People: Open Source, Open Data

Up last this morning was Leigh Heyman (Executive Office of the President) in a talk titled We The People: Open Source, Open Data. We The People is the White House’s online petition platform. Online petitions are not particularly new, but there hasn’t been much change in the way they’re handled. The goal of We The People is to change that – President Obama said that he wanted to have the most transparent and open administration in history – and so We The People was born. Leigh pointed us to the White House Death Star petition and to show that the administration was going to stand by their promise they responded to this petition because it met the threshold.

When talking about open source specifically though you can go look at Whitehouse.gov/developers. So what’s next?? APIs for Whitehouse.gov and We The People. A hackathon was held at the White House to create more APIs.